The Bourgeois Charm of Karl Marx & the Ideological Irony of American Jurisprudence

The Bourgeois Charm of Karl Marx & the Ideological Irony of American Jurisprudence employs a well-known body of work, Marx’s, to explain the inevitable limits of scholarship, in the hope of encouraging academic boldness and diversity, especially within American jurisprudence.

While scholarly meaning-making has been addressed in specific academic areas-mostly linguistics and philosophy-it has never been addressed in a triangular relationship between the text and its instigator, as well as its subsequent interpellator. Furthermore, while addressed as a result of difference, it has never been addressed for today’s liberal theory, which includes liberal jurisprudence, through the mirror of Marxist difference.

Scholarship is the unique product of the instigator’s private and public subjectivity, as all theory is aimed to be communicated and used by the scholarly community and beyond. Understanding its public life, textual instigators aim to control its meaning employing various research methods to observe reality and then to convey their narrative, or ‘philosophy’. But meaning is not fixed; it is negotiated by instigators and those theories interpellate according to their own private and public subjectivity, which covers their ideology. Negotiated meaning is always a surprise to both parties involved, surprise which is at once ironic and ideological.